The internet is mostly terrible but it can be beautiful sometimes...But he never learned to use the dramatic tool of "smoothing the skirt"
I didn't. I come from (and write about) international espionage. Hillary Clinton has the background of plotting realistically about that. That's why I read the book. I think that's a legitimate reason for one writer to read a book by someone else with the qualifying background to plot in that genre. She disappointed me about not doing that well in State of Terror, but I didn't know that about the book until I'd read it.
If you think that is the only possible motivation for it, maybe you are due some introspection.
I haven't posted "only motivations." If you're so defensive about this, maybe you are due some introspection.
You're blinded by your predjudices, or something else.
I doubt anyone has any attachment to or interest in her other than recognizing the name of the author of books they'd read and enjoyed before.
I like objective and fair (and experienced) better. *smile*
As I posted earlier, you may have missed it:
Okay, who are they and where is this from?
In a story I have pending, the female narrator, as an aside near the end, complains about the wordy writing in Lady Chatterly's Lover. She thinks something like, "Come on David, let's more this along already."
Movie: Zoolander. Front row is Will Ferrell and Milla Jovovich. I think that might be Gavin Rossdale and Gwen Stefani behind them, then Owen Wilson on the right.
Of course, those lucrative books also receive plenty of reviews along those lines. Colleen Hoover is probably one of the most lucrative names in the business right now, and you don't have to look far to find people tearing her books apart. (I read one of her books. It didn't make me eager for more, but it was—by far—not the worst thing I read this year.)It's not so much a matter of being hurt, perhaps, but I can see why it would cause some incredulous, hair-pulling frustration to see lucrative books like that, which have presumably been professionally edited and so forth, and then to come here and find a comment that goes something like 'plot too contrived, characters not believable, 2 stars.'
Given that the authors who are being critiqued here are all professional writers, your condemnation of the criticism looks mighty inconsistent if not outright hypocritical.
You're wrong. I just read a really interesting article about what we can learn about the publishing business from the Penguin v. DOJ antitrust case, and it talks extensively about this. Publishers are constantly looking for the next big thing and doing their best to create them, of course, but their hit rate is low: a book doesn't become a smash hit just because of a marketing push. The successes are mostly serendipitous, more or less unpredictable phenomena.
So I think SimonDoom has it right:
Genre writers only become popular if they provide something the market wants. They don't need to be even competent stylists—most readers don't have good critical faculties when it comes to prose, or they just don't care—but they need to provide just the right flavor of escapism that the audience craves. Right formula, right time, and a large heaping of luck.
There's another dimension to that. A wildly successful book migh give no readers what they want most, but gives millions of readers what they want just barely enough to buy it.
Not everybody!
Yes, but she can dry her tears of anguish with highly absorbent hundred dollar bills!
I don't agree. Nobody sells that much without plenty of reader enthusiasm. And if you look at writers like E.L. James and Colleen Hoover, they have hordes of superfans. (Also, according to the article linked, practically nobody sells that much, period. At least not through traditional publishers.)
McDonald's offers something that isn't just a barely adequate version of something better you can get elsewhere, though. I'm sure many of us have had cravings for McDonald's that wouldn't be satisfied by a "higher-quality" burger from a more upscale restaurant.
Your opinion on quality differs from others. Most people, and this site is an example, want to be entertained, and if an author entertains them then to them, that's quality.
Their main virtues were that they were: 1. ubiquitous, 2.predictable, and 3. cheap. There are starting to lose the second two, as I found out during my first visit there in three years (I had to eat something, and they were right there.) The predictability part was weak when they took over a half-hour to prepare my order from the kiosk. The price: I think it was $18.25 for two fish sandwiches (the kind of thing once served in rehab centers), a small fries, and a medium-sized orange juice. The juice was the best part of the meal.
